ˈab-ˌstrakt
Time
ˈab-ˌstrakt
James Joyce
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The Crisscrossing Histories of Abstract and Extract
Abstract is most frequently used as an adjective (“abstract ideas”) and a noun (“an abstract of the article”), but its somewhat less common use as a verb in English helps to clarify its Latin roots. The verb abstract is used to mean “summarize,” as in “abstracting an academic paper.” This meaning is a figurative derivative of the verb’s meanings “to remove” or “to separate.”
We trace the origins of abstract to the combination of the Latin roots ab-, a prefix meaning “from” or “away,” with the verb trahere, meaning “to pull” or “to draw.” The result was the Latin verb abstrahere, which meant “to remove forcibly” or “to drag away.” Its past participle abstractus had the meanings “removed,” “secluded,” “incorporeal,” and, ultimately, “summarized,” meanings which came to English from Medieval Latin.
Interestingly, the word passed from Latin into French with competing spellings as both abstract (closer to the Latin) and abstrait (which reflected the French form of abstrahere, abstraire), the spelling retained in modern French.
The idea of “removing” or “pulling away” connects abstract to extract, which stems from Latin through the combination of trahere with the prefix ex-, meaning “out of” or “away from.” Extract forms a kind of mirror image of abstract: more common as a verb, but also used as a noun and adjective. The adjective, meaning “derived or descended,” is now obsolete, as is a sense of the noun that overlapped with abstract, “summary.” The words intersected and have separated in modern English, but it’s easy to see that abstract applies to something that has been summarized, and summarized means “extracted from a larger work.”
Examples of abstract in a Sentence
Samantha Power, New York Times Book Review, 14 Mar. 2002
A glance into the classrooms of the Los Angeles public school system … fleshes out the abstract debates with the faces of children.
—Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 1997
I take my photographs and print them on a laser copying machine in the "photo" mode; the resulting image is more stark and abstract than a traditional photographic print, which tends to dominate the page regardless of the text.
—Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, 1996
abstract ideas such as love and hate
“Honesty” is an abstract word.
The word “poem” is concrete, the word “poetry” is abstract.
Noun
an artist admired for his abstracts
the scientist wrote a bare-bones abstract of his research and conclusions
Verb
… artists in the group put the emphasis on geometric abstraction rather than images abstracted from nature.
—Robert Atkins, Art Spoke, 1993
… the Romantic project was to abstract from religion its essential "feeling" and leave contemptuously behind its traditional formulations.
—Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 1969
… conscientiously and with great purity made the uncompromising effort to abstract his view of life into an art work …
—Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, 1959
… basic esthetic criteria and standards he has abstracted from long intimacy with time-tested masterpieces.
—Aline B. Saarinen, New York Times Book Review, 7 Nov. 1954
Data for the study was abstracted from hospital records.
personal problems abstracted him so persistently that he struggled to keep his mind on his work
Laura Solla, Glamour, 25 Oct. 2025
There’s nothing abstract about it.
—Jordana Comiter, PEOPLE, 25 Oct. 2025
Grace Edquist, Vogue, 23 Oct. 2025
One of the only reports, an abstract from researchers at the University of Miami and Vanderbilt University that was published in 2010 and presented at an international meeting for autism research, looked at autism among the Amish from Indiana and Ohio.
—Mary Kekatos, ABC News, 14 Oct. 2025
Justin Chang, New Yorker, 9 Oct. 2025
The personal, human impact is gruesome, and always worth re-centering when things get abstracted into statistics and profits.
—James Folta, Literary Hub, 22 Sep. 2025
See All Example Sentences for abstract
Cite this Entry
“Abstract.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abstract. Accessed 31 Oct. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
abstract
1 of 3 adjective
ˈab-ˌstrakt
abstract
2 of 3 noun
abstract
3 of 3 verb
ˈab-ˌstrakt
Adjective
from Latin abstractus "abstract," from earlier abstrahere "to draw away," from abs-, ab- "from, away" and trahere "to draw" — related to attract, trace entry 1, trace entry 3
Medical Definition
abstract
1 of 2 noun
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